Agatha Christie Meets Out of Africa?

 Annamaria, Happy Annamaria

I am rejoicing because today my Africa series is free at last.  It had seemed to be thriving when the third in series launched back in 2018.  But, by the end of that last pre-Covid year, the series was in the doldrums, quickly found itself in limbo, which soon turned into purgatory.  After years there, it began to look as if it was headed to hell.  (The difference between Purgatory and Hell, of course, is only one of timing.  Purgatory is temporary. Hell, we all know, is permanent.). As of today, the series is back!

The original publisher of Strange Gods then used the words of the title of my blog today to describe the first book and the entire planned series.  Dame Agatha's name works if it reads as code for a murder mystery.  But are the Vera and Tolliver books like Out of Africa?  My answer is, "Sort of."  Here's why:

Those familiar with Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen's famous book or the movie loosely based on her life will easily recall that from a business point of view, Karen's coffee farm had its ups and downs.  Certainly, like Karen's farm, my Vera and Tolliver books started off quite well, but ran into trouble. My fondest hope is that the series will now depart from Karen's Out of Africa story. Her farm was ultimately a failure.  I am doing everything I can to avoid such a fate.  And I have the distinct advantage of not having to rely on the weather, which did in Karen's coffee.  For Vera and Tolliver, I cry "Onward and upward!" Excelsior, as we say in Latin.

The strongest correlation between the Out of Africa and V&T is the time in history and the place where the stories are set.  Almost equally equivalent is the cast of characters.  Karen herself does not arrive until the 4th book, because in real life, Karen did not arrive in BEA until 1914.  But, many of the real people she is going meet when she gets there are already in the books, including the man she will marry within hours of arriving: Bror von Blixen-Finecke.  In fact, Bror is here in volume one, giving evidence in Justin Tolliver's first murder investigation.

The film does not stick slavishly to every fact of Karen's existence, but it does follow pretty closely the general emotional arc of her life in BEA.  And to the extent that she shows up in the V&T series, she stays very close to the character and actions of the real Karen (who was played by Meryl Street).

Sydney Pollack’s brilliant film's credits and opening are, to me, some of the most engaging and beautiful ever.   

Today V&T return with Book 1.  This is the first in reviving the series and getting all the back-list books available asap.

You can order Strange Gods here.  I hope you will.  And also review it.  As my blog brother Jeff Siger and others of our mates have stated here, your on-line reviews are enormously important to the success of any book.  

The plan is to release new editions of V&T#s 2 and 3 in quick succession.  A Death on the Lord's Day V&T#4 has been waiting in the wings since May of 2018! It's release this coming Spring/Summer is the prize I have had my eyes on all this while.

Choosing a Setting for Fiction

 Annamaria on Monday

As with the works of many of my stellar blogmates, the title Murder is Everywhere fits my books perfectly.  I want to talk about how I choose my fictional locations today.  But first, I cannot help but begin by revealing the cover of a new edition of my Vera & Tolliver #1: Strange Gods, which is about to launch.

A thing I love about this cover art is its portrayal of the splendor of the location.  For me, when thinking about a story, location comes first.  I attribute this to my early childhood infatuation with an atlas and the wanderlust bug whose bite still dominates at least a chamber and a half of my heart.  As soon as I had the wherewithal, I started traveling.

I also knew when I was nine years old that I wanted to write stories.  But my two major compulsions did not join up until I was closing in on retirement age and could afford the luxury of indulging my whims.  That's when fascinating places and their histories began to inspire my stories.

My first three novels are set in different times and places in South America, all stand-alones, because I was not savvy enough to think of writing a series.  When my agent and my publisher suggested a series, the idea intimidated me.  All my stories had arisen from the history of a place I had fallen in love with.  Would I be able to find a number of stories, all with the same people in many places or all in the same place always with the same people?

I knew if I was going send my imagination to only one place for a long time, it would have to be Africa.  No other place fed my soul like the places in South Africa and Botswana that I had only recently visited for the first time.  And I had read and reread Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa a few times, and had a glimpse of East Africa's history from her point of view.

I also worried about coming up with a series-worth of unique plots.  A few memoirs of people who had had boots on the ground in British East Africa convinced me that there would be no paucity of plot material. Colonialism sets up the perfect atmosphere for a series of murder mysteries. BEA in the second decade of the 20th Century offered plot fodder galore.

The scores of tribes in what is now Kenya had been fighting one another there for a millennium:

The Maasai VS the Kikuyu

The mssionaries had been on the scene for a few decades, working to convert the "natives" to Christianity, with the second passionate goal of stamping out the slave trade.  By the turn of the 20th Century, with the strategic importance of controlling Lake Victoria, the King's faithful empire builders wanted to employ the labor of the tribal people, whereas the missionaries were determined to protect their converts from being forced to work for puny rewards.

The Missionaries VS The Administrators

Then in came a flood of aristocrats who were finding it hard to acquire a cushy lifestyle in European countries that were undergoing the Industrial Revolution.

The settlers in the lap of luxury!

These latest arrivals looked down their toffee noses at the missionaries AND the administrators, who were - after all - nothing but a bunch of  shopkeepers children.

There they were waiting for me, an entire population that had many, many reasons to want to kill one another!

As long as it is fictionally, what fun!